Tuesday, June 23, 2015

You've heard of the 80:20 rule. 80% of the time focus on your strict diet and exercise routine and 20% of the time, don't worry about it. And the 80%, it's usually filled with lots of difficult to follow and remember rules, and generally includes a fair bit of sacrifice and restriction.

Well I've got a different ratio to sell you on today. It's the 95:5 ratio, and if you follow it, you can ignore every new fad diet, every well-intentioned friendly lifestyle zealot, and every supplement huckster out there.

Here goes.

Focus 95% of your healthy living energies on:

Cooking your meals from fresh whole ingredients while minimizing restaurant meals and ultra-processed foods (and remember too "minimize" is a relative term and one that you can continually improve upon but need not start at awesome), and then eating those meals free from distractions and ideally with friends or family.

Exercising as often and as much as you can enjoy, and ideally more days of the week than not, while still remembering if all you can find are short bursts, they're good too.

Not smoking

Cultivating good night sleeps (dark, cool and quiet rooms, no screens right before bed, set sleep times, no caffeine past noon, rare alcohol within 3 hours of bed time would be a good start)

When indulging, asking first if it's worth it, and second what's the smallest amount you need to be happy?

Drinking alcohol only in moderation (1 daily for women, 2 for men)

Nurturing your friendships and relationships

As to what makes up the remaining 5%? Well it's everything else. It's stuff like "best" diets, "right" exercises, organic fruits and vegetables, grass-fed meats, ancient grains, supplements, cleanses, and all that other minutia that people spend so much time agonizing over despite the very real likelihood that even were all those things scientifically, demonstrably, useful (most aren't), in a best case scenario, when compared with the impact of the 95%, that 5% might increase a person's quantity of life by a few days or weeks, while agonizing over that 5% would definitely suck away a whole pile of quality.

Life's too short to worry about the minutia of healthful living and if you're looking for the best bang for your healthful living buck, look to the unsexy, but incredibly beneficial, 95%.

Subscribe via Email

About Me

Family doc, Associate Prof. at the University of Ottawa, Author of The Diet Fix, and founder of Ottawa's non-surgical Bariatric Medical Institute - a multi-disciplinary, ethical, evidence-based nutrition and weight management centre. Nowadays I'm more likely to stop drugs than start them. You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook.

Creative Commons License

Disclaimer

Any medical discussion on this page is intended to be of a general nature only. This page is not designed to give specific medical advice. If you have a medical problem you should consult your own physician for advice specific to your own situation. The mission of this blog is to provide readers with critical appraisals of nutrition and weight related claims, products and policies so as to allow readers to make more informed decisions in those areas.

The author will not post anything related to any of his patients personal medical histories or circumstances without their explicit written permission.

No personal information is collected by this website. If you'd like to leave a comment on an article, you can do so on this blog's Facebook page.

This site is hosted free of charge by Google's Blogger platform and is intended not only for allied health professionals but also for interested members of the general public.

If you have any concerns feel free to email me at yonifreedhoff [{@}] gmail dot . com